


Chateau d'Oiseaux

by Nettlesomely



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abuse of the French Language, BAMF Hermione Granger, Big Man who likes Scary Women, Cursebreaking, Debunking Voldemort's Mythbuilding, F/M, Finding a Founder AU, Hermione 'fuck the government' Granger, Home Renovation Porn, Salazar 'fuck dem birds' Slytherin, Veela, Veela LORE BABEY, is this a Monster House AU?, it's more likely than you think, oh no my house came with a man AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:35:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24533167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nettlesomely/pseuds/Nettlesomely
Summary: When Hermione purchases an abandoned château in France, her friends think she’s finally lost it. In the sleepy wizarding village below, rumor has it that the old manor is cursed. Hermione is pretty sure she is, too.Or, Hermione takes on the mother of all renovations and tries to split magic down to its gooey center in one go. After all, she’s never been one to let sleeping dogs lie.Hermione Granger/Salazar Slytherin
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Salazar Slytherin
Comments: 21
Kudos: 179





	Chateau d'Oiseaux

“And you are  _ certain  _ about this?” Gerard pressed for the third or fourth time, his long, pale fingers fluttering over the rim of his cold espresso.

_ “Quite  _ certain,” Hermione replied. She waved a flippant hand over her shoulder, as if she could brush away all of the blond wizard’s worries with the gesture alone. “It’s just a house, Gerard _.  _ It won’t scare me away.” Taking a long sip from her coffee, Hermione quirked a brow at him over the porcelain rim. “Why all the resistance now, anyway? Just last month you were practically begging me to take it off your hands.”

The couple sat in a small cafe, identical to any other cafe in the whole of France. With its wicker chairs and round metal tables accompanied by the waft of cigarette smoke filtering in through the open door from smokers murmuring beneath the striped awning, it would have been recognizable to any passing traveler as a place to find a half-decent croissant and cup of coffee. The only difference between  _ their _ cafe and that of any other, perhaps, was the self-cleaning ashtrays, velvet-robed customers, and the occasional  _ crack  _ of Apparation that rattled the windows from time to time. 

In the far corner, beneath a wall of slightly foggy windows, sat Hermione and Fleur Delacour’s second cousin, Gerard Delacour III. He was tall and as strikingly,  _ unnaturally  _ handsome as his cousin, just as Hermione expected. It pleased her to note that he was just as warm to her in person as he was in the many letters they exchanged over the last several months. 

What she didn’t anticipate, however, was his sudden reluctance to hand over the key to her new home.

Gerard cleared his throat and looked away from her, his blue eyes and platinum hair flashing in the soft gold light of the ancient bulbs hanging above them. He didn’t look embarrassed, precisely, but uncomfortable, like he wished to squirm out of his seat and onto the checkered tile floor. “I was glad to get your letter,” he admitted, his English nearly unaccented after so many years away from his homeland, “but it’s… different, seeing you ‘ere. It becomes very real, you know.”

An errant curl managed to escape the twist at the back of her head and fell against her cheek; Hermione flicked it back behind her ear impatiently. _Damn thunderstorms._ The humidity made the mass of her hair damn near unmanageable. “I don’t understand the problem, Gerard.”

After all, the sale was done; her gold already transferred from her vault to his. She’d taken her sabbatical from Gringotts and packed all her things. She’d already said her goodbyes. It was a  _ little late _ for doubts.

Gerard, who shared his cousin’s profoundly but sharply beautiful facial features, sent her a helpless look, shrugging. “I worry.” Leaning back in his wicker chair, he gestured to her with one elegant finger. “It was easy to sign the blight away when I didn’t know you, but after so many letters and seeing you ‘ere in person… I worry that you are biting off more than you can chew, Madame Granger.”

_ Oh, is that all?  _ Hermione was visibly relieved. For a moment she feared he was having second thoughts about selling his ancestral home to a virtual stranger, not to mention a  _ foreigner _ . If it was just a very  _ male  _ concern for her safety he had on his mind, well, she could handle that _.  _

Crossing her jean-clad ankles beneath her chair, Hermione tried to send Gerard a reassuring look that lacked the very real amusement she felt bubbling inside of her. It was sweet, really. A little irritating, of course, but no more than she was used to. Harry and Ron were always saying the same thing.

Or they used to, at any rate.

“I see,” she replied, adjusting the cuffs of her favorite wool jumper over her wrists. “Well, I appreciate your concern, but it’s a little late for that, don’t you think? I do own the thing now.”

Gerard pursed his full lips, his eyes lingering on the fingers tugging at her sleeves.  _ His  _ sleeves were cuffed in some poor dead creature’s pelt, insulating him from the chill in the air without the need for a warming charm. “It’s never too late. I could transfer the money back to you.”

“Absolutely not.” Wrinkling her nose, Hermione shot him a baleful glare. “I’ve already let go of my flat in London and said goodbye to all my friends. I can’t just go back now because you’ve gotten cold feet.”

“But what if something ‘appens to you in that old place?” he asked, scowling at her. “I would feel terrible!”

“Rubbish. I can take care of myself perfectly well, thank you very much.”

Gerard shook his head. “I just want you to remember this conversation later, Madame Granger. I  _ did  _ try to talk you out of it.”

“Well,” she said, smiling wryly, “you’re certainly in good company.”

∞

Chȃteau d’Oiseaux was breathtaking.

Not in the romantic,  _ here’s a brochure in case you ever decide to get a boyfriend  _ kind of way. Not even in the  _ holy shit, look at that view  _ way. The chȃteau was breathtaking in the very literal sense: upon the first glimpse of its dark, steeply pointed roof through the balding trees, Hermione felt the air in her lungs escape her in one great  _ whoosh  _ of pure, instinctual awe. 

They had to Apparate well outside of the castle grounds due to the wards, but even at a distance the chȃteau dominated the landscape. To call it a castle was a bit of misnomer, though. It seemed to her a bit closer to a grand manor house, the bastard offspring of the usual English fair she was familiar with and a medieval fortress; all heavy wood accents, rough-hewn stone and crumbling Rocco decoration. It lacked the grace of Hogwarts’s swooping arches and narrow towers, and it was no  _ Mont Saint-Michel,  _ but it held its ground nonetheless.

Chȃteau d’Oiseaux rose up out of the side of the mountain like a slab of granite thrust straight up from the Earth’s crust; its shape a heavy, sharply-edged rectangle nearly overgrown with wild rose bushes and ivy. Empty windows stared out at the surrounding mountains and down to the village below, ever-watchful behind an ornate wrought-iron gate so tall she wondered who in their right mind would build such a thing. 

_ Were they trying to keep out giants? _

To her right, leaves crunched under dragonhide boots. Tearing her gaze away from the imposing structure that was now legally hers, she frowned at her companion. Gerard looked vaguely ill.

“You alright there?”

“I’m fine. This place ‘as just never sat well with me,” he assured her, smoothing his hands down the lapels of his velvet coat. Tilting his face upward, Gerard looked over his long, narrow nose to peer suspiciously at the chȃteau. Almost muttering to himself, he said, “Glad to see the old place is just as unsettling as it used to be.”

Hermione cocked her head to one side, turning her curious gaze back to the building that had been neglected for at least five generations. “You said none of your family ever lived here, so why did you bother seeing it at all?”

A sweet but damp Autumn wind whistled through the fiery trees over their heads, loosing more of Hermione’s curls from their confinement at the back of her head. Gerard adjusted his collar to block out the chill, saying, “The wards. I ‘ave to - excuse me,  _ ‘ad to -  _ return once every five years to seal the property and refresh the wards once ownership was transferred to me after my father’s passing.”

And  _ that  _ was why Gerard had to be there. Hermione would have been just as happy to show up on the chȃteau’s stoop all by herself, but she didn’t fancy being torn to pieces by blood wards.

With a very French grumble, Gerard led the way up the sloping, leaf-strewn path towards the imposing iron gate. All around them, damp leaves of red, gold, and brown shook on ancient branches. A flock of crows cackled in the distance.

_ The gravel path will need to be refurbished, _ she noted, eyeing the bald patches of exposed dirt that littered the once grand entryway. 

By the time they made it to the top of the slope, their feet slipping on loose stones, and both were flushed and out of breath. Hermione loosened the scarf around her neck and squinted up at the ridiculous iron gate as it loomed over her head, all spikes and filigree and old, watchful magic. 

Gerard, cursing the walk and the voluminous folds of his expensive coat, dug around in his pockets for the ancient key. When he finally found it, Hermione gawked. “Good  _ lord,  _ did it need to be so  _ huge?  _ A simple charm would have done just as well! _ ” _

“It’s a status thing,” Gerard sighed, pushing the monstrosity of a skeleton key into the lock with two hands. Gesturing for her to step back as soon as it slid into the ornate mechanism, Gerard snapped his fingers. Nothing happened for a long moment, as if the gate were deliberating whether it should listen or not; then it was breaking apart in the middle like a pair of doors swinging backwards, the spikes and the filigree curling inward as it melted into the imposing fence on either side.

_ “Wow,”  _ Hermione breathed, stopping a few steps past the gate to sweep her gaze over her new home.

They stood in a courtyard, its decorative foliage long dead or massively overgrown, the single marble fountain at its center cracked and weathered. Hulking, crooked trees dominated the edges of the property: five hundred year old walnut and willow and oak, with trunks as thick and gnarled as any found in the Forbidden Forest. They swayed in the cool wind, ancient trunks groaning with the weight of their age. Later, she would inspect the trees and the fountain and the medieval well tucked beneath a canopy of overgrown hedges, but just then all she could focus on was the château itself.

Nestled amongst the ivy and roses, its foundations built sometime around the year 1000 AD, with its rooms left empty for five generations, Château d’Oiseaux stood like a sullen sentinel over them. A long, rectangular building with three sections of sharply steepled roofing and prim rows of once opulent windows stretching across its sad face, the home appeared to look down at the pair as they approached the sweeping staircases that lead to the bolted door.  _ And who are  _ **_you,_ ** it seemed to say to Hermione, disdain written in every plaster cherub and flower molded to its surface.  _ What business do you have with  _ **_me?_ **

It was by no means the most stunning thing she had ever seen, nor was it particularly unique. There were hundreds of old châteaus built in just the same style dotting the Pyrenees, all bearing that same Rocco dressing and old, gray stone. What made it of particular interest to  _ her,  _ however, was the way the hair on the back of her neck stood on end when she stood in its shadow; how magic fairly  _ oozed _ out of its mortar.

Staring up at it, Hermione felt an old, familiar burn in her chest. She stared into the empty windows with a grim but pleased smile.  _ It’s perfect. _

“The orchard is that way,” Gerard was saying, gesturing to her left, his voice unnaturally loud, “or what’s left of it, anyway. And the stables and carriage ‘ouse are on the other side, along with the elve’s quarters.”

She shot him a sharp glance, but Gerard wasn’t looking at her. With his hands shoved deep in his pockets, he took the mossy steps two at a time, as if getting to the top of the stairs and to the front door faster might alleviate some of the tension he felt. He was talking again, loudly, as she hurried to match his pace up the steps.

“You know, I never understood ‘ow people could live here for as long as they did. The Delacour’s ‘ave owned this place for generations, but none of us ever bothered with it. Before that it was the  _ Montblanc  _ family, and before them the  _ du Terre’s.  _ Every few generations a new family would get the title to the place, you know? Like no one really wanted to keep it. I think  _ we’ve  _ ‘ad it the longest, mostly because we never actually tried to live here.”

“Why didn’t anyone want to live here, d’you think?” she asked, already armed with her own suspicions.

Gerard shrugged, but it lacked the very French carelessness that the gesture had in the cafe. It was stiff. Brittle, even. “It’s an unsettling place, _Madame.”_ He shot a look at her from the corners of his eyes. “Don’t you feel it?”

They reached the top of the stairs. Hermione took a moment to examine her companion, filing away the tight set of his mouth and rigid posture in the back of her mind. She’d seen Cursebreakers with that look, back when her obsession first took root. 

“Of course,” she agreed, turning her eyes away from him to examine the ornate, impossibly heavy door barring their way into the home, “but that’s why I’m here, Gerard.” 

Gerard reached for Hermione’s elbow. His fingers were gentle on the curve of her arm, and when she looked up at him she saw true concern in the blue of his eyes. “I wish you would tell me,  _ Madame,  _ what it is you are looking for here. Per’aps then I might help you.”

Hermione, whose soft heart  _ really  _ couldn’t take such an open and honest show of concern, felt a twinge of guilt. Logically she knew there was nothing to feel guilty for, not  _ really.  _ She was not required to disclose her reasons for anything she did - not even to Harry or Ron, if they bothered to actually ask her. Still, it wasn’t in her nature to cause unnecessary worry.

Hermione sighed, her breath puffing out in a great cloud between them, and reached out to press her chilled fingertips to Gerard’s arm. “I’ve a lot of reasons for wanting this place,” she admitted, examining the wrinkle between Gerard’s perfectly slanted eyebrows. “Many of them are personal, I’m afraid. But I  _ promise  _ you, should I encounter anything I can’t handle, you will be the first to know.”

His expression hardly changed. If anything, his face became slightly more tense. A flash of liquid silver in his eyes caught her attention like the warning it was. “You will be living ‘ere alone, yes?”

_ Ah,  _ she thought,  _ here it is.  _ She wondered if she would see any of that legendary Veela protectiveness, but about the  _ house,  _ not her. A little touched, Hermione patted his arm again. 

“Yes, Gerard, I will be. But you shouldn’t worry. I can take very good care of myself.”

A stormy look crossed his face, but whatever instinct he felt, or whatever worries he had, Gerard managed to rein them in. Reluctantly releasing her elbow, he pursed his full lips at her and muttered,  _ “Can  _ and  _ should  _ are two different things,  _ Madame.”  _

Hermione cleared her throat, a hint of that unbearable awkwardness of her Hogwarts years rearing its ugly head again. “I  _ will  _ let you know how things are going, Gerard,” she offered, painfully and with effort, “and… Well, this is your ancestral home. Maybe when it’s fixed up and lived in a little, you might… visit? You might feel better then, I mean.”

The hard line of Gerard’s broad shoulders did not relax, but his expression eased somewhat. He looked away from her, a blush suffusing his pale skin, and ran a hand through his blond waves. “Yes. Yes, I would like that,  _ Madame.  _ And I am sorry if I come off as, ah,  _ strong.  _ Sometimes it is difficult for me, with my ‘eritage.” He cleared his throat, adding hastily, “Still, it is no excuse.”

Hermione promptly shook her head. She dropped her hand from his arm and took a small step back, not wanting to make it any harder on him. “No need to apologize. I understand completely. It’s just biology, after all.”

Having seen the legendary Veela protectiveness firsthand, Hermione was more than sympathetic to his plight. All it took was one afternoon in Fleur’s company after the birth of her baby for her to grasp just how much the compulsion to protect could derail someone like them.

And she  _ was  _ something like a baby in Gerard’s eyes, really. Letters were one thing, but when he saw her and smelled her, there was little doubt in Hermione’s mind that his instincts immediately rebelled against the idea of her living in a ruin on her own. She was an unprotected, unmarried female of decent, childbearing age, after all. If she were Veela, she would still be under the protection of her flock, awaiting her choice of male. To be out on her own without the protection of a mate or a flock was inconceivable, against all instinct. 

Gerard was half Veela - a stronger connection than even Fleur, whose grandmother was Veela - and although he was male and therefore less prone to the magical pitfalls of the race, he clearly still struggled with the acute instincts of his mother’s kind. 

“Thank you,” he murmured. Clearly eager to get past the sudden awkward silence between them, Gerard sent her a bashful smile and gestured toward the great wooden door. “Would you like to do the ‘onors, or should I?”

Grinning from ear to ear, Hermione stepped forward and placed her hands on the ornate brass handles, carved to look like the neck and head of swans. A jolt of sudden and intense heat seared a path up her palms and through her arms, but it wasn’t painful; instead it was invigorating, like the first breath of air after being underwater for too long, or the heat of a fire on snow-kissed skin.

She gasped, static crackling in her curls, and watched as the whorls of carved wood and tarnished brass filigree twisted and curled around themselves, each piece turning like the gears in a clock. The handles turned on their own beneath her hands. She let go, watching as the great doors swung inward with a deafening creak. A draft of cold, musty air blew past them, as if the old house were taking a breath for the first time in centuries.

Gerard cursed.

Hermione, who knew a thing or two about abandoned structures, was not at all surprised by the state of the interior. Despite the many charms that were put in place to keep the home relatively untouched until the owners returned for it, time was not kind to the château. 

Stepping past the threshold, Hermione cast a quick charm and lit up the cavernous interior, dark for so many generations.

“Ah,” she breathed, unmoved by the sight of the once grand staircase, now crumbling, nor the portion of collapsed roof, nor even the great rolls of paint and wallpaper peeling from the towering walls.

“Well, it could be much worse.” Hermione propped her hands on her hips and strolled across the dusty foyer. She nudged pieces of fallen plaster with the toe of her boot, revealing fine veined marble beneath. She spun in a slow circle, her head tilted back to get a good look at the patchwork of broken decorative molding on the soaring ceiling.

_ It’s beautiful,  _ she found herself thinking.  _ Even half-torn down, this place is incredible. Why would anyone let it sit for so long? _

_ “Madame,”  _ Gerard was saying, something in his voice snapping her attention back to the doorway, “you  _ cannot  _ stay ‘ere. I can’t allow it. You will freeze to death in this ruin.”

Wand in hand, Hermione patted the little beaded bag at her hip. “I  _ am _ a witch, Gerard.”

He scowled, watching as she stuck her arm shoulder-deep into the little bag and retrieved what looked like a scrap of green fabric. Sweeping out towards the center of the foyer with her wand, Hermione cleared the marble floor of centuries-worth of dust and debris before she dropped the little square of fabric in the cleaned area. With a flick of her wand, a tent exploded outward from the square. Righting itself, the tent settled onto the marble floor and planted itself there, light pouring out from beneath the door flap like she had only just stepped out of it.

Gerard watched from the doorway, his brow wrinkled in displeasure and his sensitive nose turned up and away slightly to get away from the stale smell of the home. He shook his head. “You are a  _ very  _ strange woman,  _ Madame,”  _ he told her, eyeing the cheery little tent in the midst of all the ruin. 

Hermione sent him a wide, uninhibited grin. “Oh, you haven’t a _clue.”_

∞

It took a year of dedicated research after her discovery in the bowels of Gringotts to find her way to Château d’Oiseaux, and now that she was there, it all felt a little surreal. It was what she wanted, of course, but as Hermione soaked in the heat from the fireplace within her tent, she couldn’t help but wish Harry and Ron were there to take on the challenge with her.

_ They couldn’t- didn’t  want  _to be,_ _ she reminded herself, shying away from the complex and unwieldy ball of emotions the thought of her friends inspired in her.  _ They have lives to live now. Families to start, babies to raise. Hunting down mysteries isn’t a priority anymore. _

She understood that. 

A childhood full of death and danger was enough to put anyone off of adventuring, she supposed. And it wasn’t like she’d exactly  _ invited  _ them, anyway. Harry had his career and his wife and his baby on the way. Ron had his fiancee to wed, the shop to look after. If she still harbored the vain hope that they could revisit the old days of discovery with her, she tried not to be too disappointed when they didn’t return the sentiment. 

It wasn’t that she felt any sort of nostalgia for the days of the war, because she unequivocally did not. Rather, she could not understand how everyone she knew chose to cope with the aftermath. They were only just twenty-five, but it seemed that everyone she knew had made a pact to get married and have babies at the same time, all of them perfectly content to eventually send their children to the very same school in eleven-or-so years, where they’d all nearly died, pretending like nothing happened. That they expected the same of her, consciously or not, was abundantly clear.

Hermione  _ loved  _ Hogwarts. She  _ loved  _ the wizarding world. She  _ loved  _ her friends. But she was not content. She was not willing to settle down and drink the Kool-Aid, no matter what the people around her expected. 

“You could be the youngest Minister of Magic in history,” Kingsley told her, some years after the restoration of Hogwarts was officially complete. “Isn’t that what you want? All you need to do is get in with the Ministry and work your way up. You could change the world, you know.”

By “work your way up” she knew he meant that she would need to learn to play nice with the very system whose flaws and corruption nearly got her and everyone she loved killed. She would be expected to marry a wizard, to do the right thing and produce good magical children, to soften herself and bend to the very people who would have happily seen her strung up in a noose when she was just a child.

She just couldn’t  _ do  _ that.

Hermione did want to change the world, but not on anyone else’s terms. And it was there, in recognising that crucial fact, that the seeds of her discontent were sewn. Her breakup with Ron happened shortly after she turned down a position in the Department of International Magical Cooperation and accepted a lucrative offer to work for the goblins of Gringotts Bank.

In hindsight, her path seemed obvious. Hermione, a sucker for a good mystery and meticulous spellwork, needed a project that would let her run away from the suffocation of her friends’ changing lives and their increasingly pointed questions. She needed something to do that did not involve watching her friends leave her behind.

Besides, the opportunity to debunk the center of Voldemort’s claim to supremacy, still clung to by the followers hidden behind closed doors and outright blood supremacists that liked to threaten her still, was an added bonus she was powerless to refuse.

Hermione had a leatherbound notebook propped open in her lap and a ballpoint pen in her right hand. The key Gerard once carried in his pocket sat on the small round table beside her. On the crisp white page she diligently jotted down her impressions of the home, making note of each room and its state of decay. She made a special section just for the wards, recalling the specific incantation Gerard used to transfer ownership. 

The wards were not  _ easy  _ to transfer, of course, but all in all, they weren’t the worst thing she ever experienced. A little draining, perhaps, and it would take some time to get used to the way her magic was tied up in the property, but she’d done more taxing spellwork in her Hogwarts years. 

Long after Gerard left her to become acquainted with her new home, Hermione sat in an armchair in the tent’s sitting room, flexing and unflexing her left hand. The wound had sealed itself almost immediately, but she fancied that she could still feel the tightness of new skin over the thin gash in her palm. 

Restoring d’Oiseaux to its former glory would be a hellish amount of work, but Hermione already knew that. Realistically, she didn't _need_ to go through all the effort, but she'd bought the damn place, so she intended to do it justice. Besides, she spent nearly two years putting Hogwarts back together, largely unsupervised and left to delve into the secrets of its creation unchecked. Compared to that monumental effort, a couple dozen rooms didn’t seem quite so bad, really. 

There were twenty-three rooms separated into two wings, East and West, but Hermione didn’t think that they were ever at capacity. She researched d’Oiseaux thoroughly before she contacted Gerard, and from what she could tell no one ever spent much time there. Since its construction, the home was something of a hot potato, bouncing from one unwilling hand to another. 

It certainly seemed as though the place should have been coveted, considering its vast swath of property in the fertile Foix Valley, the ancient orchards of wand wood-quality trees it harbored, and its easily defensible position at the top of a mountain. Still, no one wanted it. The noble wizarding families who owned the place seemed to view it as more of a burden than anything, even when it should have been the most valuable property in their possession.

After centuries of sparse use and the decline of the nobility following the French Revolution, it fell to the Delacour family, who tried foisting it off on others no less than four times before they simply gave up and shut the place down entirely.

Hermione tapped the tip of her pen against the corner of the page, chewing at her lip as she organised her thoughts. She would hire some help, of course, but only for the more menial jobs, like refacing the walls, clearing the rubble, and hooking up the Floo system. The structural work would have to be hers alone. 

No one else could be trusted with the foundations, after all. And even if they could be, she had her doubts that anyone other than her could handle it.

Finishing up her notes and her to-do list, Hermione unfurled herself from her chair and made her way to her room, promising herself that she would write to her friends in the morning. They thought she was mad, but that was alright. They had their lives. Now she had hers. 

She was just slipping her sleep shirt over her shoulders when she felt it. A prickle of heat ran up her spine, following the notches like rungs in a ladder, until it settled in the base of her skull. It bloomed there in the same instant that the frame of her tent heaved, nearly sending her careening into her dresser. 

_ “Oof,”  _ she grunted, blowing a lock of hair out of her eyes. “That didn’t take long, did it?”

Hermione tugged the shirt into place and pushed away from the dresser, her hair crackling. Tucking her wand into the waistband of her pajama pants, she slid her feet into her shoes and grabbed her coat off of the hook on the wall. 

The moment she crossed the threshold of her tent, the heat turned to ice. 

Hermione let an involuntary shiver run through her and swept her eyes over the wreckage of the grand foyer, her heart beating faster with a familiar rush of adrenalin. Her wand was in her hand in a moment, pointed up and out. Light bloomed from a ball over her head. THe glow settled uneasily in the cracks and debris, casting long, ghoulish shadows in deep blues and purples.

A draft snuck in through the hole in the ceiling, ruffling her hair. “Hello,” she announced, as dignified as she could be. Turning in a slow circle, her stomach clenched hard with the familiar feeling of someone watching her from the shadows.

But it wasn’t a ghost in the shadows, or a madman waiting to lead out from a pile of rubble cast down by the brittle ceiling and one too many rough winters. It was the house itself, as sentient as any other magical dwelling she encountered, and growing increasingly agitated at her insistence on staying within its walls.

“You haven’t even got to know me yet,” she pointed out, voice echoing strangely on the crumbling plaster. Her face was set in strong lines of mulish determination when she made her case. “I know you don’t want me here. You don’t want  _ anyone  _ here, I’d guess, but I’m not about to be run off so soon. I’m here to help you, you silly thing.”

A tremor rumbled through the marble under her feet. It ran up the walls, making the huge strips of peeling wallpaper move like lolling tongues, and another chunk of the roof broke loose. It landed with a blast of plaster dust several yards away from her. It felt a little bit like a warning shot.

Hermione pursed her lips at the ceiling. “I’m going to have to fix that, you know,” she griped, “and _really,_ you’re only hurting yourself with all that. This isn’t my first time dealing with stubborn buildings, I’ll have you know.” She thought of the Room of Requirement, and the fourth floor boys lavatory, and the hell that was trying to get the _bloody_ stairs to stay still long enough for repairs. Compared to that, a little shaking was hardly a blip on her radar. 

“Now,” she continued, clapping her hands together primly, “I want no more ruckus tonight, if you could be so kind. You and I have a big day tomorrow, so I’d like to get some sleep.”

The house groaned. It was the collective sound of ancient wood, grinding stone, and crackingly glass; a complaint and a warning and a cry rolled into one terrible noise. Hermione thought it sounded rather mutinous, but then, all old buildings sounded that way - like they had everything to complain about, and like the magic that imbued them with their unique brand of sentience was more of a curse than a gift.

She supposed she couldn’t blame them, given the state of things.

Whiskey eyes glittering in the glow of her charm, she twirled her wand this way and that way. Her voice was a whisper when she said, “You and I have a lot of secrets to share, I think, but until then, I would very much appreciate it if you didn’t try anything nefarious. I  _ am  _ bloodbound to this place now, after all.”

Another low, mutinous rumble. Hermione smiled. 

“Yes, it must be very bothersome to know you can’t outright kill me. I’ve heard I’m quite irritating, so I can only imagine.” She tilted her head to one side, listening to the faintest hissing sound. It didn’t sound real, and for a moment she felt the crawl of dread on her skin. She would never be able to hear that sound without seeing yellow eyes in a mirror.

_ Still, I’m not scared of a little tantrum,  _ she thought, a flinty look settling over her features. 

Turning to head back into her tent, she placed her hand on the flap and warned, “I promise you, there’s no chasing me off. I’m here to find something, and I’m not the type to give up because a few shingles fall on my head.”

Waving her wand over her shoulder, she extinguished the light. “Goodnight,” she called, feeling the shadows pressing in on her back, invisible hands pawing at her, magic prickling at her skin and zinging through her teeth. Hermione held firm. Her eyes slanted over her shoulder just in time to see the vaguest shape of a person flickering in and out of view, caught like a phantom between frames of a film. 

Her smile was sharp and full of challenge.  _ There you are. _

“See you in the morning,” she whispered, “Salazar.”


End file.
